Loved this. There's an episode of Modern Family where they are comped super-fancy rooms in a Vegas hotel and are living the high-life until they realise there is actually a floor above them to which they don't have access, which ruins the whole experience.
- "...honestly not much worse than being a suitcase" made me LOL.
- Having spent many years in the airline equivalent of steerage, I was eventually fortunate to start flying Business Class through my work, and found it quite addictive. For my rare, personal international flights, I will now pay a pretty penny for that privilege. And I love British Air.
- I'm glad to hear that you are putting your teaspoon(s) on the scale of economics!
Ha, yes — "half-inched" is London rhyming slang that I hadn't used in years, but just seemed to be the right word! And you're right, once you've had a few business flights it starts to feel like the only sane way of doing it...
I remember my time in the digital trenches of Seattle 20-odd years ago. I met a number of nascent techbros then, happy to switch allegiances from one tech giant to another as they skipped up the ladder. Smart but insincere - if toothpaste were the bleeding edge of corporate opportunity then they would jump there in a heartbeat.
There were lots of good people, dedicated to service who made a little money and then jumped out of tech into becoming high-school teachers, nurses and foreign aid workers. Unfortunately they are not the ones we read about.
When we were young kids my family moved a lot with army. By the time I was 7 yrs old we'ed moved 8 times and I'd been to 10 different schools. My parents decided to send me and my brother to boarding school. At the time my dad was a corporal and my mum worked in a chip shop and a video shop, so we weren't "typical" public school boys. What this meant was that at 8yrs of age my brother and I would have to get ourselves from Liverpool to Germany on our own. Bad people tended not to be in people's minds in those days and the act of catching 2 trains, the tube, a bus then a plane was very exciting. We would fly about 8 times a year and it became something of a second nature to us. I bloody love flying.
Many years later I went on a snowboarding trip to Vermont. It was all expenses paid by my girlfriend's aunt, who was, to put it mildly, really fucking rich! 9 of us, including her kids, went cattle class. She flew 1st class.
I was in hog heaven in cattle, but then each of us received a message from a flight attendant asking if we could go to first class to check out visas with my girlfriend's aunt. When my turn came a smiling attendant guided me from the back of the plane to the front. When I got to first class my girlfriend's aunt was the only passenger in there. Some of the other seats were taken by Virgin staff deadheading (is that the right term). I basically spent 5 minutes staring open mouthed at the seats, the lights, the attendants and the seats. It really was another world. Even the smiles on the attendants were subtly different.
On a trip last summer to Chicago (from London) 4 of us were upgraded from Premium Economy to 'business'. The whole experience of flying from one continent to another was transformed, my lasting impression is that to truly understand how trying flying long haul can be, you just need to be moved beyond the curtain that one time. I suspect that this was partly BA working like a dealer, just giving us that first taste for free and then waiting for us to come sidling back, credit and club card in hand desperate for our next fix.
Ha — yes, exactly. Because you're right, once you've done it that way once, you understand how people can zip back and forth without breaking... the experience is so entirely different.
Smooth take-off and landing with style - great piece.
I encourage you to think again about using AI-generated images, though.
Last summer I met a pair of professional illustrators who were devastated about what those tools are doing to their industry and to their creative and financial prospects. I see AI being used all over Substack, of course, but I feel that as independent writers, avoiding the plaigarism machine is the right thing to do.
P.S. Having never flown anything more than standard economy and a BA red-eye coming up next week (yes, economy class), it's reassuring to read that even business leaves you feeling like you got the short end somehow.
Thank you — glad you enjoyed the piece. I'm currently mulling over where I stand on the use of AI images here. Thank you for the perspective, will definitely bear in mind.
Good luck with the BA red-eye economy... that's my more accustomed mode of travel and yeah, it's tiring ;-)
Love the commentary Michael, very on point as always.
One thing in this case though, the inequality doesn’t come from progress, it’s purely greed.
Our social networks, and those who hold the keys to those virtual kingdoms, no longer support the needs of their users, they exploit them.
Yes, there’s an argument that the WeirdAIGuy™️ has built a company that benefits us, but given he was kicked out for brutally commercialising something against the mandate of a business that absolutely was looking to advance things for all, I have to wonder what the future will be given he’s back there.
I've never seen a reason to pay more for a more comfortable place on the plane. I hope that even if I had the money to spend I would still think that way. Flying is going to be uncomfortable wherever you are and I try to be as mindful in other aspects too. It does sound to me that going local is the only way, buy local, focus efforts locally, but as someone who has friends all over the globe I really think some option to megalomaniacs needs to be found. Staying away from Meta, anything El Musko and so forth... it's not easy though. I still fret over the amount of time I spent in building up a good Twitter following and the latest TikTok ban made it really clear that a lot of people are relying on people, who do not care, for their "platforming needs" so to speak... Great piece! Lots to think about.
He is a particularly loathsome figure - I find myself resenting anyone driving a Tesla now (most didn’t realise at the time what a twat he is but still…)
Great piece, I experienced the feeling of there’s always someone higher up the food chain. One of my photos was in a charity auction and was hanging next to Mary and Mike McCartney’s, Paul McCartney’s family, the auction was being hosted by the head of Sotheby’s who I’d met a few times, he came over and spent a good amount of time talking to me, I was surprised he remembered me, eventually I realised it was my proximity to the mccartneys that kept him hanging with me, he was hoping to introduce himself to Paul when he turned up, be well
That’s a great post. I saw Michael Stipe had the same thoughts today but we actually have to do it. I have weaned myself of all of them (even the news - I have to watch that at 10pm just like we used to) and it’s OK. The one that baffles me most is (here in the U.K. at least) is WhatsApp when you can’t even get a phone contract without unlimited messages and calls). Everybody I know is on it and I’ve had to say out loud “just text me like you used to”. It might not be much but once a rebel and all that.., you have to stick it to the man wherever you can. Genuinely, my life is better for it - my spoon collection is not so big as yours but I must confess I find steak knives from chain restaurants a lot more satisfying.
There was a time when a cohort of billionaires seemed genuinely interested in using their wealth for the betterment of society. Warren Buffet giving away practically all his money. Bill Gates trying to eradicate malaria. Mark Zuckerberg got in on the act, committing to give away 99% of his wealth. The primary narrative was: If we make money, the world benefits. Somehow, this shifted in the last decade or so. As society becomes more stratified, the top .0001% aren't even pretending to care. But at least you're keeping the rural cutlery-makers in business.
I love this! Back in the dark ages of punch card programming, when I worked for BA at LHR, I was able to get a few (staff benefit) First Class flights on a 747 from LHR to JFK. Though back then BA staff behaved very badly to staff travellers. ‘You want a gin & tonic????’ ‘And you expect me to get one for you’?. Once I was no longer working for airlines I didn't want to fly economy ever again. Or BA. Of course reality set in at some point. United then became the way to fly to LHR from the Bay Area, & then Norwegian started up and boy was that convenient, & their premier class was pretty good & no more expensive than UA econ. However they ended, with Covid, & the first time we flew back to the UK, Dec 2021, we went back to BA & yes, Business class. I agree with everything around the service, the food (had THE best Welsh lamb on one flight), the terrible website & challenging customer service. Perhaps at some point, after winning the lottery, we’ll fly First. I don't think I can go back to econ for long haul though.
I've had to do BA super-economy for expedience a couple of times and IF you can get a bulkhead, it's do-able. But absolutely not fun. Whereas I actually *enjoyed* the food on this last flight...
Isn’t it great to enjoy the food on a flight? Although as I get ‘older’ I find that some of the ‘things’ that can happen with the change in altitude to affect one’s digestion for a few days mean that I just can’t eat the quantity anymore. No fair …..
Flying, more than any other form of mass transport, acts as an in-your-face sorting hat. I first flew in my twenties; smokers vs non-smokers. I can only survive a long-haul flight in an exit or bulkhead aisle seat. The animal in me panics at confinement and constraint. Plus, like you, I need to walk. Shuffling down the aisles, looking down on all those cramped forms lit by the glow of tiny screens or strapped into some sort of medieval neck brace in search of sleep - it’s like viewing weirdly crippled bioluminescent fish in some cheap aquarium. My next long-haul, back to Africa, will be in a bulkhead just aft of first. This seems unnecessarily cruel. But I sense there may also be peace to be had there, as surely the dishevelled hordes at my back will have been repelled by the curtain or a steely steward long before reaching my row.
Loved this. There's an episode of Modern Family where they are comped super-fancy rooms in a Vegas hotel and are living the high-life until they realise there is actually a floor above them to which they don't have access, which ruins the whole experience.
Ah, brilliant - precisely! There's probably a movie in that idea...
Random responses:
- "Half-inched?" That's a new one on me!
- "...honestly not much worse than being a suitcase" made me LOL.
- Having spent many years in the airline equivalent of steerage, I was eventually fortunate to start flying Business Class through my work, and found it quite addictive. For my rare, personal international flights, I will now pay a pretty penny for that privilege. And I love British Air.
- I'm glad to hear that you are putting your teaspoon(s) on the scale of economics!
Ha, yes — "half-inched" is London rhyming slang that I hadn't used in years, but just seemed to be the right word! And you're right, once you've had a few business flights it starts to feel like the only sane way of doing it...
I remember my time in the digital trenches of Seattle 20-odd years ago. I met a number of nascent techbros then, happy to switch allegiances from one tech giant to another as they skipped up the ladder. Smart but insincere - if toothpaste were the bleeding edge of corporate opportunity then they would jump there in a heartbeat.
There were lots of good people, dedicated to service who made a little money and then jumped out of tech into becoming high-school teachers, nurses and foreign aid workers. Unfortunately they are not the ones we read about.
Indeed... the profession has become self-selecting and not in a good way...
When we were young kids my family moved a lot with army. By the time I was 7 yrs old we'ed moved 8 times and I'd been to 10 different schools. My parents decided to send me and my brother to boarding school. At the time my dad was a corporal and my mum worked in a chip shop and a video shop, so we weren't "typical" public school boys. What this meant was that at 8yrs of age my brother and I would have to get ourselves from Liverpool to Germany on our own. Bad people tended not to be in people's minds in those days and the act of catching 2 trains, the tube, a bus then a plane was very exciting. We would fly about 8 times a year and it became something of a second nature to us. I bloody love flying.
Many years later I went on a snowboarding trip to Vermont. It was all expenses paid by my girlfriend's aunt, who was, to put it mildly, really fucking rich! 9 of us, including her kids, went cattle class. She flew 1st class.
I was in hog heaven in cattle, but then each of us received a message from a flight attendant asking if we could go to first class to check out visas with my girlfriend's aunt. When my turn came a smiling attendant guided me from the back of the plane to the front. When I got to first class my girlfriend's aunt was the only passenger in there. Some of the other seats were taken by Virgin staff deadheading (is that the right term). I basically spent 5 minutes staring open mouthed at the seats, the lights, the attendants and the seats. It really was another world. Even the smiles on the attendants were subtly different.
Would love to try it sometime😁
Interesting to hear someone with a similar background — and therefore a similar sense of "flying is the gateway to everything different..."
Business (and first, the one time I've wound up there) genuinely is worth the money. IF it's someone else's money ;-)
On a trip last summer to Chicago (from London) 4 of us were upgraded from Premium Economy to 'business'. The whole experience of flying from one continent to another was transformed, my lasting impression is that to truly understand how trying flying long haul can be, you just need to be moved beyond the curtain that one time. I suspect that this was partly BA working like a dealer, just giving us that first taste for free and then waiting for us to come sidling back, credit and club card in hand desperate for our next fix.
Ha — yes, exactly. Because you're right, once you've done it that way once, you understand how people can zip back and forth without breaking... the experience is so entirely different.
Smooth take-off and landing with style - great piece.
I encourage you to think again about using AI-generated images, though.
Last summer I met a pair of professional illustrators who were devastated about what those tools are doing to their industry and to their creative and financial prospects. I see AI being used all over Substack, of course, but I feel that as independent writers, avoiding the plaigarism machine is the right thing to do.
P.S. Having never flown anything more than standard economy and a BA red-eye coming up next week (yes, economy class), it's reassuring to read that even business leaves you feeling like you got the short end somehow.
Thank you — glad you enjoyed the piece. I'm currently mulling over where I stand on the use of AI images here. Thank you for the perspective, will definitely bear in mind.
Good luck with the BA red-eye economy... that's my more accustomed mode of travel and yeah, it's tiring ;-)
Love the commentary Michael, very on point as always.
One thing in this case though, the inequality doesn’t come from progress, it’s purely greed.
Our social networks, and those who hold the keys to those virtual kingdoms, no longer support the needs of their users, they exploit them.
Yes, there’s an argument that the WeirdAIGuy™️ has built a company that benefits us, but given he was kicked out for brutally commercialising something against the mandate of a business that absolutely was looking to advance things for all, I have to wonder what the future will be given he’s back there.
Sad times for the majority of us…
Yep: greed used to be at least slightly sugar-coated. These days the mask has come off.
"We’re no longer a society. We’re a business. And we’re not all in this together." You said it!
Sadly...
While I am Not Cheered by this post, I am delighted that your family collected an entire set of flatware!!
You take your victories where you can ;-)
I've never seen a reason to pay more for a more comfortable place on the plane. I hope that even if I had the money to spend I would still think that way. Flying is going to be uncomfortable wherever you are and I try to be as mindful in other aspects too. It does sound to me that going local is the only way, buy local, focus efforts locally, but as someone who has friends all over the globe I really think some option to megalomaniacs needs to be found. Staying away from Meta, anything El Musko and so forth... it's not easy though. I still fret over the amount of time I spent in building up a good Twitter following and the latest TikTok ban made it really clear that a lot of people are relying on people, who do not care, for their "platforming needs" so to speak... Great piece! Lots to think about.
Yes, I spent a decade doggedly building a community on Twitter and it's lost now... one of the reasons I loathe Musk quite so much.
He is a particularly loathsome figure - I find myself resenting anyone driving a Tesla now (most didn’t realise at the time what a twat he is but still…)
Great piece, I experienced the feeling of there’s always someone higher up the food chain. One of my photos was in a charity auction and was hanging next to Mary and Mike McCartney’s, Paul McCartney’s family, the auction was being hosted by the head of Sotheby’s who I’d met a few times, he came over and spent a good amount of time talking to me, I was surprised he remembered me, eventually I realised it was my proximity to the mccartneys that kept him hanging with me, he was hoping to introduce himself to Paul when he turned up, be well
Ah, of course. Sigh. Hope all's well with you — been a while!
That’s a great post. I saw Michael Stipe had the same thoughts today but we actually have to do it. I have weaned myself of all of them (even the news - I have to watch that at 10pm just like we used to) and it’s OK. The one that baffles me most is (here in the U.K. at least) is WhatsApp when you can’t even get a phone contract without unlimited messages and calls). Everybody I know is on it and I’ve had to say out loud “just text me like you used to”. It might not be much but once a rebel and all that.., you have to stick it to the man wherever you can. Genuinely, my life is better for it - my spoon collection is not so big as yours but I must confess I find steak knives from chain restaurants a lot more satisfying.
And possibly more useful if the class war really gets serious... limit to how much damage you can do with a spoon ;-)
First of all: Great piece.
There was a time when a cohort of billionaires seemed genuinely interested in using their wealth for the betterment of society. Warren Buffet giving away practically all his money. Bill Gates trying to eradicate malaria. Mark Zuckerberg got in on the act, committing to give away 99% of his wealth. The primary narrative was: If we make money, the world benefits. Somehow, this shifted in the last decade or so. As society becomes more stratified, the top .0001% aren't even pretending to care. But at least you're keeping the rural cutlery-makers in business.
Doing my best ;-) But yes — either the masks came off, or the rich changed. These are not great times.
I love this! Back in the dark ages of punch card programming, when I worked for BA at LHR, I was able to get a few (staff benefit) First Class flights on a 747 from LHR to JFK. Though back then BA staff behaved very badly to staff travellers. ‘You want a gin & tonic????’ ‘And you expect me to get one for you’?. Once I was no longer working for airlines I didn't want to fly economy ever again. Or BA. Of course reality set in at some point. United then became the way to fly to LHR from the Bay Area, & then Norwegian started up and boy was that convenient, & their premier class was pretty good & no more expensive than UA econ. However they ended, with Covid, & the first time we flew back to the UK, Dec 2021, we went back to BA & yes, Business class. I agree with everything around the service, the food (had THE best Welsh lamb on one flight), the terrible website & challenging customer service. Perhaps at some point, after winning the lottery, we’ll fly First. I don't think I can go back to econ for long haul though.
I've had to do BA super-economy for expedience a couple of times and IF you can get a bulkhead, it's do-able. But absolutely not fun. Whereas I actually *enjoyed* the food on this last flight...
Isn’t it great to enjoy the food on a flight? Although as I get ‘older’ I find that some of the ‘things’ that can happen with the change in altitude to affect one’s digestion for a few days mean that I just can’t eat the quantity anymore. No fair …..
Flying, more than any other form of mass transport, acts as an in-your-face sorting hat. I first flew in my twenties; smokers vs non-smokers. I can only survive a long-haul flight in an exit or bulkhead aisle seat. The animal in me panics at confinement and constraint. Plus, like you, I need to walk. Shuffling down the aisles, looking down on all those cramped forms lit by the glow of tiny screens or strapped into some sort of medieval neck brace in search of sleep - it’s like viewing weirdly crippled bioluminescent fish in some cheap aquarium. My next long-haul, back to Africa, will be in a bulkhead just aft of first. This seems unnecessarily cruel. But I sense there may also be peace to be had there, as surely the dishevelled hordes at my back will have been repelled by the curtain or a steely steward long before reaching my row.
That's a BEAUTIFUL piece of writing, and a great summation of the entire experience!
You’re very kind! ☺️
It's not really about "class" though is it?
And congratulations on getting "Half-inched" into that piece. This is something that our family say regularly but is not often heard these days.